Letters to Mr W. Baumann, CEO Bayer AG (4-6)

4. The extraordinary will not happen this time.

Dear Mr Baumann,

well, a tyrant, I do not think you are, and whether and what of the above applies will be better judged by others. So if ‘everyone’, even in the narrower sense, namely your target groups, doesn’t interest you, then you will have very little interest in what Hannah Arendt calls ‘the extraordinary’. I can still understand that this ‘extraordinary’, the possibility of creating a ‘reality’ for the company, for Bayer, so also for the employees is not in your field of vision, but what about the ‘extraordinary’ for you personally, about your ‘reality’ about your ‘being’. How do you create it? With the shareholders, it doesn’t seem to work out quite so well. Well, that’s none of my business. But if you think that #forbetterlife alone will fix everything, then unfortunately, dear Mr. Baumann, you are mistaken.

5. #forbetterlife only makes things worse for the employees.

Dear Mr Baumann,

this Bayer motto (mission) – #forbetterlife – should then appear ‘credible and worthy of opinion’. But it certainly does not do so for a large number of target groups. In your product portfolio, this motto very often means: better life for some at the (very often health-related) expense of others. If you think that’s okay, that’s one thing, but if the employees have adopted this view, then you and they have a pretty big problem. This big problem above all that both you and the people who think like you, in this way you are narrowing down ‘reality’ enormously, not to say creating a rather poor parallel world of valuable content for ‘being’.

6. What we say shapes our inner being, not vice versa.

Dear Mr Baumann,

of course, one could try to neutralize all these disadvantages in this parallel world of yours, but it will not work either in monologue with yourself, even with the very best and most expensive mindfulness exercises, or in dialogue in such a clearly reduced and mentally massively impoverished, therefore mostly inevitably self-confirming group. The philosopher and former rector of the University of Hamburg Ernst Cassierer said that, contrary to what the vast majority of people believe, not our thoughts, not our inner world shape what we say, but the other way round. Yeah, you got it right: Whatever you say shapes your inner world. No, no, not the other way round, dear Mr Baumann.